This week, Warren took aim at Daniel Stipano, deputy chief counsel of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Richard Ashton, deputy general counsel for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, who testified before a Banking Committee subcommittee on Thursday at a hearing on the role of independent consultants. Warren criticized the men for not providing information to Congress or to homeowners about illegal foreclosures in order to help the homeowners receive compensation.

“I think the question that we put to the regulators is whether they were there to help protect banks or to help protect families that had been the victims of illegal foreclosure practices, and I was not satisfied with the answers, and we’re going to stay after them,” Warren told MassLive.com on Friday.

Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor and expert on bankruptcy law who helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, has been talking about illegal foreclosures for years and got involved on a congressional level soon after she took office.

Warren and U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote to Bernanke and Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry in January asking for information about legal violations committed by mortgage servicing companies.

The Federal Reserve, the Comptroller’s office and other agencies had in April 2011 released a report reviewing 14 mortgage servicing companies. The report found that “the weaknesses at each servicer, individually or collectively, resulted in unsafe and unsound practices and violations of applicable federal and state law and requirements.” The problems, they found, had “widespread consequences for the national housing market and borrowers.”

The agencies reviewed a small number of files, then required the mortgage service companies to hire an independent firm to review all foreclosures that took place in 2009 and 2010, identify anyone who was financially harmed by deficient practices and provide remediation. However, that review was stopped this February when the mortgage service companies agreed to a settlement in which they would pay around $9 billion in cash and other assistance to borrowers, including more than $3 billion to those whose homes were foreclosed on in 2009 or 2010.

The Federal Reserve and Controller’s Office have said eligible borrowers will receive compensation ranging from hundreds of dollars to $125,000, and the settlement will allow them to get the money faster than if the review process were completed.

Warren and Cummings wrote in a letter to Bernanke and Curry this week that of 14 requests they made for information about the review process, nine have not been answered. “You have provided little specific information on what the review actually found, such as the number of improper foreclosures, the amount and number of instances of inflated fees, or the extent of abusive practices by each mortgage servicer,” they wrote. Violations that Warren and Cummings focused on included foreclosures against military members who should have had legal protection and the filing of court documents with false information.

According to Warren and Cummings’s letter, the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said the documents would reveal the trade secrets of mortgage servicing companies and would disclose confidential bank examination information.

“We strongly believe that documents should not be withheld from any Member of Congress based on the flawed argument that illegal activity by banks is somehow their proprietary business information,” Warren and Cummings wrote. “Breaking the law is not a corporate trade secret.”

Warren continued to hammer Stipano and Ashton at this week’s hearing. In one exchange, Warren established that homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed on can still sue the bank that foreclosed, despite the settlement, and information discovered by the regulators’ review could be helpful to them. However, when Warren quizzed the regulators about whether they planned to release information to families, Ashton responded, “That’s a decision were still considering.” Stipano said the Comptroller’s office is in the “same situation.”

That led Warren to castigate the regulators. “Families get pennies on the dollar in the settlement for having been victims of illegal activities or mistakes in banks’ activities. You know of individual cases where the banks violated the law, and you’re not going to tell the homeowners?” Warren asked.

“People want to know their regulators are watching out for the American public not for the banks,” she added. “The only way we can evaluate whether you’re doing your job is if you make information publicly available. And so far, you’re not doing that.”

On Friday, speaking to reporters after a tour of the Cambridge Innovation Center, Warren criticized the regulators again. “I think the principle role that they fell down on the job was to make sure that the illegal activities didn’t occur in the first place,” Warren said. She said there were reports in the press about illegal foreclosures and regulators “were obviously not as aggressive as they should have been.”

Today, she said the question is what is the right compensation for people who have lost their homes. She added, “This is really about an ongoing question about who the regulators are there to protect. They don’t work for the banks. They work for the American people.”